March 5, 2009, 7 e-mails

R. K. wrote:

The city needs a major expansion of its public-transit network, with
the overwhelming priority being that of meeting the daily
transportation needs of average Toronto residents and working people.
If one of the offshoots is improved access to the airport for airport
employees and airline passengers -- and I don't see why it shouldn't
be -- so much the better.

But the approach to this rail link to the airport has been wrongheaded
from the start. For one thing, it is not public transit. As the
original poster from Weston pointed out, it is a "public-private
partnership" in which the public effectively finances and guarantees
the profits of a private conglomerate over which it has little or no
control including in the area of pricing. As we have been learning
with each passing day, whether it's hospitals or mortgage financing or
public bailouts of private companies, this type of arrangement is an
enormous scam that is far more costly to the public purse and
represents little more than a further upward transfer of wealth.
For another, any servicing of the "public good" has come as an
afterthought. The main priority has been to create a "world class"
connection to the airport from the downtown area, with little regard
for the actual transportation needs and priorities of the majority of
Torontonians and the communities the "link" will pass through. It is
misguided to think even airport employees, let alone the rest of the
city's working-class population, will benefit from this kind of elite
project.

I don't like the Island airport either, but the best way to shut it
down is by getting the federal government to respect the clear wishes
of Toronto voters, as expressed in the two past municipal elections --
and especially in the 2003 race, where this question emerged as one of
the ones central to Miller's first victory. It's an uphill battle at
this stage, but far more of a sure thing than thinking that an
expensive rail link will suddenly convince people to stop using Porter
airlines. In this economic climate, it's more likely that Porter will
just go bankrupt; that will settle the matter more effectively than
the rail link!

The government is doling out huge infrastructure funding to combat the
worsening recession. As far as transportation goes, I think this
provides an opportunity to demand a massive program of improved
transit for the everyday needs of ordinary people. And that means
investment in public transit under public control, not more handouts
to corporate scam artists servicing elite segments of the population.

Thanks for taking the time to read my comments.

S. V. wrote:

At present there is already a serviceable transit link to the airport
(subway then bus). it takes a bit more time than a car but it has
served myself and friends many times. Will this new link be any better?
Also I am always very skeptical when people say that things will be
built first then greened later as 9 time out of 10 that day never comes.
No amount of convenience will get rid of porter airlines unfortunately
they are making to much money and they get great reviews for service
and price. The only choice is for all of us to stay home and not fly.

S. P. wrote:

I must say that nothing will stop me from flying around to see the world - not even the hole in the ozone. I truly believe that spending time in other countries is a huge contributor to understanding and tolerance - and it's really, really fun.

G. T. wrote:

They will always operate that bus because airport workers take it.
They could spend some money cleaning up Kipling Station since it
might be one of the first things an international traveller sees of
Toronto. Those escalators get especially grim looking during a salty
winter. They could also announce which airport terminal they are
stopping at rather than the street address. The "Airport Express"
that runs from several hotels downtown not only announces the
terminals but also what airlines depart from them. That's a great
help for visitors and infrequent flyers. Unless you know how to take
that bus, I find it hard to call it a rocket, it is a bit confusing
to figure out, no less whether or not to get into the train at
Kipling since both sides arrive going west and leave going east.

K. F. wrote:

I am wit Monbiot on this one (see below). I think too many of us have
bought the myth that we must travel extensively to be self actualized
global citizens. Travel is a luxury of extreme privilege and had
devastating impacts on the environment. Our family has committed to
exploring Ontario and I only travel by air for work. There are all
kinds of wonderful places to visit and being a "tourist in toronto" is
a refreshing way to become more rooted in Toronto.

I challenge the myth that we need to fly to be better people and also
think that daily transit for working people is more important than the
mega P3 projects that serve a privileged slice of the population.

On the flight path to global meltdown

There is no technofix to the disastrous impact of air travel on the
environment, argues George Monbiot in the final extract from his new
book - the only answer is to ground most of the aeroplanes flying
today

George MonbiotThe Guardian, Thursday 21 September 2006Article history

Our moral dissonance about flying reminds me of something a Buddhist
once told me: "It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it
with love." I am sure he knew as well as I do that our state of mind
makes no difference to either exploited people or the environment.
Thinking like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we
also behave like ethical people. When it comes to flying, there seems
to be no connection between intention and action.

This is partly because the people who are most concerned about the
inhabitants of other countries are often those who have travelled
widely. Much of the global justice movement consists of people - like
me - whose politics were forged by their experiences abroad. While it
is easy for us to pour scorn on the drivers of sports utility
vehicles, whose politics generally differ from ours, it is rather
harder to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed,
especially the freedoms that shaped us.

More painfully, in some cases our freedoms have become obligations.
When you form relationships with people from other nations, you
accumulate what I call "love miles": the distance you must travel to
visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the
planet. If your sister-in-law is getting married in Buenos Aires, it
is both immoral to travel there, because of climate change, and
immoral not to, because of the offence it causes. In that decision we
find two valid moral codes in irreconcilable antagonism. Who could be
surprised to discover that "ethical" people are in denial about the
impacts of flying?

There are two reasons why flying dwarfs any other environmental impact
a single person can exert. The first is the distance it permits us to
cover. According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution,
the carbon emissions per passenger mile "for a fully loaded cruising
airliner are comparable to a passenger car carrying three or four
people". In other words, they are about half those, per person, of a
car containing the average loading of 1.56 people. But while the mean
distance travelled by car in the UK is 9,200 miles per year, in a
plane we can beat that in one day. On a return flight from London to
New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon
dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year
once the necessary cut in emissions has been made.

The second reason is that the climate impact of aeroplanes is not
confined to the carbon they produce. They release several different
kinds of gases and particles. Some of them cool the planet, others
warm it. In the upper tropo-sphere, where most large planes fly, hot,
wet air from the jet engine exhaust mixes with cold air. As the
moisture condenses, it can form "contrails", which in turn appear to
give rise to cirrus clouds - those high wispy formations of ice
crystals sometimes known as "horsetails". While they reflect some of
the sun's heat back into the space, they also trap heat in the
atmosphere, especially at night; the heat trapping seems to be the
stronger effect. The overall impact, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a warming effect 2.7
times that of the carbon dioxide alone.

Aviation has been growing faster than any other source of greenhouse
gases. Between 1990 and 2004, the number of people using airports in
the UK rose by 120%, and the energy the planes consumed increased by
79%. Their carbon dioxide emissions almost doubled in that period -
from 20.1 to 39.5m tonnes, or 5.5% of all the emissions this country
produces. Unless something is done to stop this growth, flying will
soon overwhelm all the cuts we manage to make elsewhere. But the
measures the government proposes are useless. The transport department
suggests that the aviation industry should "pay the external costs its
activities impose on society at large". This is an interesting
proposal, but unfortunately the department does not explain how it
could be arranged. Should a steward be sacrificed every time someone
in Ethiopia dies of hunger? As Bangladesh goes under water, will the
government demand the drowning of a commensurate number of airline
executives? The idea is strangely attractive. But the only suggestion
it makes is that aviation fuel might be taxed.

Unlike most environmentalists, who have also called for this measure,
the government knows perfectly well that fuel tax cannot be imposed on
international flights. It is prohibited under international law by
article 24 of the 1944 Chicago Convention, which has been set in stone
by 4,000 bilateral treaties - making it almost impossible to unpick.
Now the government proposes that aviation be incorporated into the
European Emissions Trading Scheme. If flights continue to grow, it
will break the system.

The one certain means of preventing more flights is the one thing the
British government refuses to do: limit the capacity of our airports.
It employs the "predict and provide" approach that has proved so
disastrous when applied to road transport: as you increase the
provision of space in order to meet the predicted demand, the demand
rises to fill it, ensuring that you need to create more space in order
to accommodate your new projections. The House of Commons
environmental audit committee calculates that the extra capacity the
government proposes means "the equivalent of another Heathrow every
five years".

The Department for Transport, along with the airline industry, claims
that expanding airport capacity is "socially inclusive", in that it
enables poorer people to fly. But a Mori poll commissioned by the
Freedom to Fly Coalition, a lobby group founded by the aviation
industry, found that 75% of those who use budget airlines are in
social classes A, B and C. The people who are most vulnerable to
climate change are the poorest inhabitants of the poorest nations, the
great majority of whom will never board an aeroplane.

So what is to be done? There are two means by which the growth in
flights could be reconciled to the need to cut carbon emissions. The
first is a massive increase in the fuel efficiency of aircraft; the
other is a new fuel.

As far as aircraft engines are concerned, major new efficiencies in
the next 20 years or so are a pipedream. The Royal Commission reports
that "the basic gas turbine design emerged in 1947. It has been the
dominant form of aircraft engine for some 50 years and there is no
serious suggestion that this will change in the foreseeable future."
It is hard to see how it could be made much more efficient than it is
already.

The choice of low carbon fuels for aeroplanes is similar to the choice
of low carbon fuels for cars. According to a paper by researchers at
Imperial College, London, it is technically possible to fly planes
whose normal fuel (kerosene) is mixed with about 5% biodiesel. But
biodiesel, as I have shown elsewhere, is likely to cause more global
warming than it prevents.

Ethanol, the same paper suggests, would be useless: it is
insufficiently dense and, in aeroplanes, extremely dangerous. This
appears to leave only hydrogen. Jets could use hydrogen today, if
instead of carrying passengers and freight they carried nothing but
fuel - it contains four times less energy by volume than kerosene. But
if this problem could be overcome, the researchers suggest, the total
climate impacts of planes fuelled by the gas "would be much lower than
from kerosene".

Unfortunately, when hydrogen burns, it creates water. A hydrogen plane
will produce 2.6 times as much water vapour as a plane running on
kerosene. This, they admit, would be a major problem if hydrogen
planes flew as high as ordinary craft. But if the aircraft flew below
10,000 metres (33,000ft), where contrails are less likely to form, the
impact would be negligible. What they have forgotten is that because
hydrogen requires a far bigger fuel tank than kerosene, the structure
(or "airframe") of the plane would need to be much larger. This means
it would be subject to more drag. The Royal Commission points out that
"the combination of larger drag and lower weight would require flight
at higher altitudes" than planes fuelled by kerosene. In fact,
hydrogen planes, if they are ever used, are most likely to be deployed
as supersonic jets in the stratosphere. If so, their impact on the
climate would be around 13 times that of a normal aircraft running on
kerosene.

And that, I'm afraid, is that. As the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change discovered, "There would not appear to be any practical
alternatives to kerosene-based fuels for commercial jet aircraft for
the next several decades." There is, in other words, no technofix. The
growth in aviation and the need to address climate change cannot be
reconciled. In common with all other sectors, aviation's contribution
to global warming must be reduced in the UK by some 87% if we are to
avoid a 2C rise in global temperatures. Given that the likely possible
efficiencies are small and tend to counteract each other, an 87% cut
in emissions requires not only that growth stops, but that most of the
aeroplanes flying today be grounded. I realise that this is not a
popular message, but it is hard to see how a different conclusion
could be extracted from the available evidence.

This means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are
prepared to take a long time getting there. It means that business
meetings must take place over the internet or by means of video
conferences. It means that transcontinental journeys must be made by
train or coach. It means that journeys around the world must be
reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require
both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations. It means the end
of shopping trips to New York, parties in Ibiza, second homes in
Tuscany and, most painfully for me, political meetings in Porto Alegre
- unless you believe that these activities are worth the sacrifice of
the biosphere and the lives of the poor.

But I urge you to remember that these privations affect only a tiny
proportion of the world's people. The reason they seem so harsh is
that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you.

This is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by
Allen Lane. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p (rrp £17.99),
go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875. Monbiot has also
launched a new website - turnuptheheat.org - exposing the false
environmental claims made by corporations and celebrities.

S. wrote:

I agree with everything you say here.

I think trying to push the airport link to provide local service as well will result in a system that
does not effectively serve the needs of either group - it will be too slow to provide a proper
express service for the tourists and the business travellers, and it will be too expensive and
impractical to serve local commuters.

Instead let the airport link serve the community it is intended for and get them out of their
taxis and rental cars. Focus on funding of the TTC for local transit.

Incidentally, I live on the south side of Delaney Crescent - both the airport link and the
proposed Queen St subway extension would go right through my backyard.